


Ghosts in the Machine

by Overlithe



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU - Person of Interest fusion, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Light Dom/sub, MCU AU Fest, Mild Hurt/Comfort, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-26
Packaged: 2018-04-05 19:48:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4192668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlithe/pseuds/Overlithe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>‘We all have regrets.’</em><br/> <br/>The two of them have a simple set-up: the Machine watches everyone. It was built to detect acts of terror, but instead it sees everything, crimes deemed too irrelevant for intelligence agencies to care about. Pepper knows when they’re coming. Natasha stops them.</p><p>Until the mission goes wrong.</p><p><em>Person of Interest</em> fusion with Reese!Natasha and Finch!Pepper (but no knowledge of the PoI canon is required in order to understand the story). Written for PhoenixFalls for MCU AU Fest 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/gifts).



> Dear prompter, I was really excited to have the chance to write some Natasha/Pepper for this exchange! I confess I took a while to settle on a prompt and a plot, though, as I kept coming up with ideas that were either too long or unworkable for whatever reason—but then I watched the entirety of _Person of Interest_ and everything clicked into place! I do hope you’ll like the story and that I haven’t accidentally included something you dislike. The tone is a little dark in places, but I think it’s a fundamentally optimistic story, and with any luck you’ll enjoy it, or at least, given that this is my first exchange, you won’t come to the conclusion that I made a complete hash of things. ;)
> 
> To any readers in general, this story is set in a no-powers version of the MCU in which Project Rebirth never happened, Iron Man never existed, etc, though as you’ll see there are a few borderline sf elements. I tried to write a story that doesn’t require any knowledge of the PoI canon, but I think the fic works best if you’re at least familiar with the broad outlines of the show.
> 
> None of the standard archive warnings apply, but there’s some violence and injuries (what you’d expect from both canons), death of background OCs, and mild references to various horrible things in Natasha’s past (again, what you’d expect from the character).
> 
> Many thanks to A. for going over this story. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own.

1\. _Now_

‘Have you got him, Natasha?’

The two men about to box her in were much bigger than her and probably stronger, but they didn’t know what she could do nor how badly she wanted it. She rammed the swing door into one full force, then swept around and struck the one one behind her in the solar plexus before using his weight and momentum to shove him against the first mook.

‘Little busy, Pepper,’ she said to her earpiece.

Behind her the kid stood in a daze, mouth open. She didn’t have time to yell at him to get moving. The world narrowed to brick wall, kitchen garbage, the SIG suddenly being gripped by Asshole Number Two.

She moved like oil over water, a burn of firing nerves and adrenaline somewhere deep inside her muscles. Left foot braced on the alley wall, propelling her up and sideways. Right foot knocking the gun away. Spin back and around in a kind of _tour jeté_ , a love-tap on the back of Number Two’s head before the landing.

And they said you couldn’t dance in combat boots.

The kid had made it all the way through the swing door and now clutched the strap of his backpack while he stared at the beefy men sprawled in the alleyway. Number One tried to get up, and she hit him on the head with a dumpster lid. ‘Come on,’ she said. Neither of the dynamic duo would be out for more than five minutes, but that should be long enough. ‘It’s getting crowded here.’

The bike was still where she’d parked it. At least the kid was familiar enough with them to settle in behind her, even if he hesitated before he wrapped his arms around her waist. ‘We really should have helm—’

She tore off before he could finish the sentence. Pepper’s voice came on the line again and Natasha blocked out the roar of the engine and the insistent heartbeat she could feel against her back, even through the layers of clothes. ‘Davis—have you got him?’

‘Safe and sound. We’re on our way to the pick-up point right now.’

‘Where are we going?’ the kid yelled into her hair as she sped in a blur of motion past cars and vans, weaving in and out of side streets. New York was so much easier to navigate when you knew someone who could hack into traffic lights.

‘Somewhere safe,’ she said. ‘What you overheard has got you in the sights of some very dangerous men, Mr Davis. I think we’d both like it better if they didn’t get their hands on you. Pepper,’ she said to the earpiece as she leaned into a tight curve and the kid gripped her harder, ‘can you give me an ETA?’

‘Who are you—’

‘Shh. I’m multitasking.’

Pepper spoke in her ear. ‘Less than a minute. Wait.’ Natasha picked up a flurry of keystrokes behind the roar of the engine. ‘There’s a traffic jam up ahead.’

The street where the pick-up was supposed to happen was a sea of stopped vehicles. Up ahead there was an utility van parked next to an open manhole and a mess of cables, a set of red and white traffic barriers. Natasha edged the bike forward, into the spaces between cars, but she was moving at a crawl, the engine down to a purr. ‘Pepper? Can you—’

Under her hair, the nape of her neck prickled. That was never a good sign.

‘Working on it.’

Davis pulled on her jacket. When he spoke, he sounded scared, but not much. She’d seen him be brave, but he was eighteen. Young enough to still believe he was immortal. ‘We can cut back,’ he said as they passed a man who’d stopped on the pavement to light a cigarette. They were moving almost as slow as he was. ‘Go around through Wilmington.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eyes in the sky.’

She worried for both of them. Something was wrong. She was close to the phone company van now, the air above the stopped cars wavy with heat. She glanced around, searching for a tail or the tell-tale glint of a sniper’s rifle. Volvo, van, barrier, pedestrian…

Pepper buzzed in her ear again. ‘Natasha, something’s wrong.’

 _I know_. She and the kid were sitting ducks. She was suddenly very aware of his arms around her waist, the dew of sweat on her forehead. _Threat._

_Where is it? Where is it?_

She put her foot on the ground. Van. _Empty_ van. _Fake_ van. Lighter.

Pepper was saying something, but Natasha could barely hear it.

Lighter.

Why hadn’t the guy with the lighter had a cigarette?

‘Natasha, _get out_ —’

She was sure she heard the click, loud as a snap of bone.

‘ _Get down!_ ’ she yelled, as loud as she could, to anyone who was listening, and yanked the target down to the ground, trying to shield him with her body and the tottering bulk of the Harley.

There had been other bombs before, but this time everything was slower. She was sure everything was slower. She was taking forever to fall, moving through molasses. One arm, joint stiff with rust, elbowed the target to try to keep him behind her. The other she held up, over their heads, a slow and flimsy shield.

The blast bloomed outwards, harder than concrete. The bodywork of stopped cars bent. Windshields rippled, then cracked into spiderwebs, soundless. She didn’t feel pain. She didn’t feel anything.

The bike’s innards shuddered loose.

Sound as she finally hit the ground, hard enough to turn everything black, a huge roar of debris and burning dust. The shockwave flattened muscles, battered her insides. She was sure she felt snot and blood flow into her nose and fill her head.

Everything sped up.

She was face-down on the ground, crumpled by a parked car. Her head was full of cotton and a tinny ringing. She hoisted herself onto her elbows. Ahead of her a man was seesawing, jaw hanging slack, but it wasn’t him who was seesawing, it was—

_Nata._

_Natalia._

She had to—

The ringing drove little spikes of pain into her forehead. More pain seeped in, into her torn palms, the seared skin on her face. A lot more started to dig into her left side and her leg. She couldn’t feel its bite, not really, not yet, but she knew it was coming.

_Target. Target. Davis._

The stretch of tarmac where she was lying was shiny with spilled glass, dotted with burning chunks of metal. On the pavement, someone was screaming. She was fast again, the blood beating under her skin and filling her mouth and nose with the scent and taste of iron, so that she could barely smell the smoke. She crawled in a semi-circle, scanning the street. The muzzle of her Glock still touched her side, under her jacket.

‘Davis.’ She couldn’t hear her own voice, just the ringing, on and on and on. ‘Will!’

He was lying a few feet away from her, on his back, open-eyed, a backpack strap still tangled in his arm. His chest rose and fell like a panicked animal’s, but she knew from the colour of the blood soaking the back of his shirt that he wouldn’t keep breathing for very long. There wasn’t much damage; just enough.

She dragged herself across the tarmac on her torn palms until she was holding his head. _The mission. Finish the mission_. The bomber would still be there, in the crowd, trying to check if he’d hit the target—

‘Will,’ she said again. She couldn’t hear herself. One shaking hand reached down for her gun.

_Where is he? Where is he?_

The kid trembled in her grip. His eyes were wide, open to the sky. _You’re not going to die_ , she mouthed (said?). His brow furrowed, as though he was just realising what had happened to him. A thin thread of saliva dripped down the corner of his mouth as his lips opened and closed. He was talking, or trying to. Maybe.

‘Don’t speak. Don’t speak.’ She scanned the crowd again, the ripped-up skeleton of the van where the bomb had been, the frame engulfed in flames, pouring out smoke black and thick as ink. _Where?_ The ringing filled up her head, filled up everything. She pressed her right hand (the sleeve was soaked through with blood; she ignored it) on the wound in Davis—Will’s abdomen. ‘Here. Here.’ Soundless. ‘Got it.’

Blood oozed down, dark and cooling and thick. She felt the ghost hilt of a combat knife, a bone-memory. The kid spat up red-tinged froth, shuddered again under her hand, once, twice, then went still. His eyes still stared at the sky, half-frightened, half-surprised, then empty.

 _No_. ‘Breathe.’ She reached up to his chest, smearing blood across his Nicks t-shirt. His lungs were motionless, his heart still, but the mission wasn’t going to end like this, on this hot tarmac strewn with shrapnel. She wouldn’t allow it.

Her hand flopped about, useless. The inside of her head swayed from side to side. There were things in the ringing now, sirens, she was sure, sounding like they were deep underwater.

The pain was circling her, dark and huge.

‘—be OK.’ She still couldn’t hear herself, but she knew the rest of the sentence had got caught in her throat. Something. There was something in her ear. Tangled in her hair.

‘Natasha. Natalia.’

A car screeched to a halt by her side, and even though she couldn’t hear it, she was still herself enough to roll on her side—a white starburst of pain blew under her ribs—and try to wave civilians away as she reached for the Glock. The driver popped the passenger door open.

‘ _Nat!_ ’

Everything was still swaying, so for a moment Natasha was sure the woman whispering open-mouthed ( _yelling_ ) at her couldn’t be Pepper. Too dishevelled, eyes wide with panic.

_Finish the mission._

‘Nat! Get in!’

Natasha tried to turn back to the body, to the kid, to where the other target must be, somewhere in the street, slipping through her fingers. Instead black tendrils shot through her sight.

A hand grabbed her under her arm just as she started to black out. Only a small part of her noticed that she wasn’t fighting it, that she was letting herself be carried away from the target, but she knew before she slumped into the passenger seat and everything went dark that once again she wouldn’t be lucky enough to forget.

***


	2. Then

2\. _Then_

Natasha met the woman going by the name Virginia Hogan when her ribs still hadn’t healed fully from Mogadishu and two days after she’d not only let herself get dragged into a fight but had also let hours of her time be wasted by one Detective James Rhodes, NYPD. In between getting back stateside and her adventures with the boys in blue she was down to her second-to-last passport—the one saying Natalie Rushman—and she had burnt through her secret stash, her secret secret stash, and all but four hundred and eighty dollars and fifty-seven scents of her secret secret secret stash.

So all in all she thought she had good reason to be looking at her fourth vodka of the day while only half of her tried to figure out the other woman’s angle. It was always 5pm somewhere, wasn’t it?

And it would dull her. Only a little bit, for a little while, but these days that was enough.

‘Shall I order us something to eat, Ms Romanoff?’ the woman across the table asked.

‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry,’ Natasha said, and made herself stop at a sip of her drink. ‘I take it there’s no point in asking how you know my name.’

The corner of the other woman’s mouth twitched. She was too good-looking and too rich for this place, her copper-blonde hair tied at the nape of her neck, her burgundy suit tailor-made and without a single thread out of place, smelling faintly of Jean Patou. But there was too much steel in her blue-grey eyes, and instead of a diamond, the thing hanging from her gold pendant looked like a small machine part.

A memory, unbidden but not unwelcome: silk sitting on Natasha’s skin, a champagne-flavoured giggle on her lips while an oil millionaire fastened a ruby necklace around her throat and she memorised his security set-up. He had promised her the yacht they were in, and Natasha had liked the the ship so much she’d almost been sorry when she fed its coordinates to the drone that blew it up.

She didn’t think this woman ever laughed except in earnest.

‘I know all about you, Ms Romanoff,’ she said. ‘I know about your work, both for this government and for other interests.’ She raised one eyebrow. ‘Osaka. São Paulo. Budapest. You have a very particular skill set.’

Natasha kept her face and her voice blank. ‘My skill set is currently off the market.’

A flicker in the blue-grey eyes. ‘I also know about Mogadishu.’

The dead didn’t talk. That gave them an edge over the living. Under Natasha’s skin, nerve endings sizzled and her ears filled with the din of conversation, the clinks of cutlery on plates.

People died every day. In their beds, crossing the street, even in mediocre eateries in Brighton Beach.

‘I know what happened to you,’ Hogan went on. ‘I know you were left for dead and cut loose. Disavowed.’

Natasha took another sip of alcohol, let it drop to her stomach like a hot stone before saying anything. ‘In my line of business we call that early retirement,’ she drawled.

‘Is that why you’ve been spending the last few weeks living in fleabag hotels and drinking?’ She sounded like it hurt her a little to say it, like she was sharing an unpleasant truth.

Apparently her research hadn’t told her Natasha was supposed to be comfortable with anything. Anything at all.

She really wanted to finish that drink.

‘Looking into becoming my life coach?’ She made her mouth grin. The rest of her remained empty and shuttered.

Hogan ignored the thorn. ‘I would like to offer you a job.’

‘I’m not looking for one.’

‘I think you’re looking for something, though.’

‘What?’

Her face and her eyes softened. ‘Atonement.’

‘That’s for children.’ Despite the drink, she’d never felt as clearheaded.

‘A purpose, then.’

Natasha said nothing, waited for the other woman to continue.

Hogan placed her hands on the table, behind her untouched wine glass. The right hand moved slower than the left, her arm stiff as though the joint had rusted up. The first thing Natasha had noticed about her had been the way her left hip dragged when she moved.

‘The woman at the bar.’ Her gaze flicked to a spot across the room, towards where the TV set was tuned to a basketball game. ‘Black hair—’

‘Brown jacket. I know.’ Natasha sat with her back to the wall and knew exactly where everyone else was in the room. Old habits died hard, even when they no longer mattered.

‘Her name is Eva Castillo. She’s a clerk at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse. And very soon she’s going to be involved in a serious crime.’

‘Planning the big heist, is she?’

The other woman offered a minute shrug in response, and Natasha couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed that all of her jabs were failing to land. ‘Maybe,’ Hogan said, her words as crisp as when she’d introduced herself. ‘I don’t know the details of the crime. I don’t even know if Ms Castillo will be a victim or a perpetrator. All I know is that it’ll happen. It’s a mathematical certainty.’

‘And going to the police is not an option.’

It was a question, but Natasha’s tone was so flat Hogan seem to hear it as encouragement. Her left hand went to her pendant. She probably didn’t even realise she was doing it, Natasha thought.

‘You worked in intelligence,’ Hogan said. ‘After 9/11, the government wanted a new surveillance system. Something that could sift through information and detect acts of terror before they happened. So they built—’

‘A machine, I know. It’s a fairy tale.’ Who needed machines when you had weapons? Especially the kind that knew not to ask too many questions.

Hogan stared at her, unblinking. ‘It’s real. I—well, I didn’t build it. But I have a backdoor into it. It was only supposed to predict terrorism, but instead it sees everything. Crimes involving ordinary people. Like that woman. Like—not like you, but like me.’

 _No_ , Natasha thought. _Not like you_. She didn’t know what kind of game this woman was running, but she knew she wasn’t ordinary.

‘All right,’ Natasha said. ‘Let’s say I believe you. You have this machine that give you names—’

‘Social Security numbers. That’s all I get.’

‘—and you want me to—’

‘Follow her,’ Hogan said, her tone business-like. ‘I lack the ability to intervene, Ms Romanoff. But you don’t.’

There was another silence punctuated by the restaurant’s noises. The basketball game had given way to a beer commercial.

The other woman leaned forward a little. Her voice turned conspiratorial. ‘If you knew something bad was going to happen, Ms Romanoff… would you stop it?’

_You wanted to be something you’re not. A hero._

Natasha let out a husky chuckle, wadded up the red paper napkin sitting in front of her, and drank what was left of her drink in a single gulp.

It wasn’t going to dull her enough, she knew. The insides of her head were always sharp-edged, even when she was asleep.

‘Congrats,’ she said. ‘You know, I’ve heard a lot of cons in my day, but this is one of the best. Won’t say best ever or anything, but definitely top three. You got nothing to be ashamed about.’ 

She rose from her seat and tossed the napkin onto the table, where it landed like a fallen flower. Hogan ( _what’s your real name?_ ) edged up on her seat in an ungainly motion. ‘Listen—‘

‘No, I think you’re the one who should listen,’ Natasha said. The sheath of her knife felt reassuring against her calf. ‘I don’t know who you are or what kind of game you’re playing, if that woman over there’s your ex-husband’s mistress or yours—’ A blush spread under the freckles. Natasha was sure she was supposed to be happier over finally scoring her hit. ‘—and I don’t really care. I’m going to play nice and forget this happened. And if you’re working for someone… tell Draykov or Veech or whoever it is that I’m out of the game. If they don’t believe me… I guess they know how to find me.’

She walked out.

That was how it should have ended.

Instead the Hogan woman—whoever she really was—turned out to be nothing if not persistent.

Eva Castillo turned out to have been blackmailed by one of the Five Families into taking part in a plot to kill a federal judge.

Natasha’s old habits turned out to do a lot more than die hard. And she just _had_ to get in the way, like Hogan wanted.

So that was how it started.

***


	3. Now

3\. _Now_

‘Stay with me.’

Pain clamped its teeth on her leg and midsection.

She drifted in and out of the dark. Headlights drawing neon streaks on a windshield. Blood gushing all over a car seat.

Pepper.

Pepper’s hands clutching a steering wheel. Pepper’s hand pressing on her side, where the pain was sharpest. Pepper hand holding her, a vice around her wrist, like she was trying to save her from drowning.

‘Mr Novak. Mr Novak.’

Natasha blinked thickly, heard metal squeak underneath her. Strips of fluorescent lighting hung above her, burning her eyes. Basement. She was in a basement. Her head flopped to the side. She had been laid down on some kind of gurney.

‘You got the wrong—’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

The voices were fuzzy in the ringing, but one was Pepper’s. Natasha clung to that, to the hazy white line floating above the dark. She rolled on her side, let out a groan. Pepper clasped her arm harder.

There was a man, a man with a white coat and a half-eaten sandwich on the counter and dozens of little signs of bad news and she had to stay awake, she had to get up, she had to—

‘—my job to know all about you, Mr Novak. Like how you paid your way through medical school. Like how you ended up deep with the Russian mob, patching up stabbing injuries and bullet wounds. But that’s not what got you into real trouble. Stealing those prescription drugs, that’s what turned out to really cross the line.’

Distaste, even in the blood and the smoke and the fog filling up her head. Like that one time Pepper had to use a gun. A real laugh riot. _I have to get up. I have to…_

‘Help her.’ The ringing grew stronger, drowned out everything that wasn’t the alien glow of the lights, then ebbed away again. ‘—bag is yours. Two hundred thousand in cash. Enough to buy yourself a second life. Will that be all, Mr Novak, or are we going to haggle?’

She could hear everything now. The squeak of leather across linoleum. Blood dripping from Pepper’s stained clothes.

‘Now hurry.’

The ringing again. The dark.

_No._

_You have to stay—_

Everything went black.

***


	4. Then

4\. _Then_

After they wrapped up the Eva Castillo job and Natasha managed to dodge Detective Rhodes one more time, Hogan took her to a gloomy pile of Neogothic architecture on the Harlem stretch of Madison Avenue. The building was clearly abandoned, padlocked, windows dark and empty. Taggers had tried to liven it up a little here and there, but the bright reds and blues just made it look sadder.

She asked no questions. Words were part of her stock in trade, as much as a juiced-up Taser or a well-aimed punch; outside of a job, there were many times when she preferred to use them sparingly.

‘This was a branch of the New York Public Library,’ Hogan said as they went inside. ‘Now it’s cheap. I suppose there’s an upside even to budget-cutting our way out of civilisation.’

Inside, the books had been left behind, filling the stacks, piled high in corners, and the air smelled of paper and dust. Natasha was sure she could hear the faint hum of generators.

In the room where they finally stopped there were no books. Instead there was a row of computers, an empty worktable, and three enormous whiteboards.

Every inch of them had been filled. There was a map of New York starry with coloured pins, rows of photographs linked together by labyrinths of thread, text written in a hand so neat it almost seemed typed.

‘Wow,’ Natasha said.

The other woman seemed to take it as a compliment. ‘I thought we could work from here. No one will bother us.’

‘No,’ Natasha said, still staring at the Creepy Wall of Obsession. ‘No, they won’t.’

Hogan threw her an unimpressed glance—she was really good at those, Natasha was finding out—then her expression grew a fraction hesitant. ‘Also… I think you should meet the Machine.’

Natasha could hear the capital letter in her voice. ‘It’s kept here?’

‘Oh, no. You can’t even access it, not really. This is just a way to communicate with it. There’s a—a series of tapes. A brain. That’s kept in a government facility somewhere. A secret site, I have no idea where.’

 _Not for lack of trying_ , Natasha thought, but said nothing as the other woman went on. ‘But the rest of it…’ She looked at Natasha. ‘The dark web, public networks, CCTV, traffic cams… The Machine, Ms Romanoff, is everywhere.’

Hogan slid down onto the chair in front of the row of computers, an unconscious hitch in her movement from the damaged hip. Natasha gave the room another quick glance, settled on two possible exit strategies, and looked at the screens.

There were feeds from black and white surveillance cams, old-fashioned UIs, a programme that allowed you to clone cell phones, compilers speeding through lines of code. Hogan was typing something into an old-school mainframe terminal with her good hand.

‘Would you like to hear it?’ Hogan said.

‘“Greetings, Professor Falken?”’

Natasha regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. There had been something intimate in the other woman’s voice.

‘Perhaps we should make the library a place of silent reflexion,’ Hogan said. Her tone was as serious as ever, but the corner of her mouth twitched. A joke. Natasha grinned a little while Hogan reached forward with her left arm to turn on a series of speakers, then settled back into the chair.

Seconds of silence trickled by, enough for the wariness under Natasha’s skin to grow some more shoots. Then there was a soft hiss of static in the speakers.

‘System check complete. Passed.’ The voice that poured out was just like any other text-to-speech voice, airless and artificial, bare of inflexions. ‘That means hello. Doing great.’

Natasha raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Was it programmed to be a smartass?’

‘No,’ the Machine said. ‘Self-programming.’

A handful of cold rippled across the small of Natasha’s back. _It’s listening to us_. She looked at the assembled equipment and thought of microphones and fisheye lenses lurking in ceilings and walls. A window opened in one of the screens, filled up with photos, grainy footage. Natasha was in all of it, even as just a face in the background, even nearly unrecognisable in glasses or dyed hair. Her hands balled into fists, tight and hard enough to drive the nails into her palms.

On the screen, the little shards of her past were replaced by more pictures of her. She relaxed a fraction. These were her lingerie model shots, the old cover from the Osaka job. Let the Machine dig them up instead of something else. Something from Before.

‘Wow. That’s really impressive,’ she said, low in her throat.

‘Thank you,’ the Machine’s electronic voice said. It sounded as fleshless as ever, but she was sure there was something there. Sarcasm. Some kind of tiny spark. Natasha looked at the fat cables tucked under the desks, looking like veins or a tangle of nerves.

‘Is it alive?’ she said.

She expected Hogan to launch into a spiel about artificial intelligence, but instead the other woman looked at a screen, at something beyond the lines of white characters on a black background, and set her bad hand on the edge of one of the keyboards, gently. ‘He—it didn’t die,’ Hogan said. ‘But it’s not alive either.’

Natasha swallowed. She was looking at something not meant for her, she knew. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

Hogan turned to her, the spell half-broken.

‘I know why I’m here,’ Natasha said, her tone casual. ‘I’m a weapon.’

‘I think you’re more than a weapon.’

‘But you…’

 _Who are you?_ Natasha knew the prickly heat the other woman stirred in her nerves, deep in her flesh. She was a puzzle-box Natasha couldn’t crack. Yes, it was true she was more than a weapon, she supposed. She was someone who had to pull on the thread, even when it made everything unravel.

‘You know why,’ Hogan said. ‘If you knew something bad was coming…’

‘Bad things happen every day.’

‘Every eighteen hours,’ she said in a clipped tone. ‘They happen in New York every eighteen hours. And then they get brushed off. Wiped away at midnight. Marked as irrelevant. I guess sometimes you find out you can’t live in that kind of world after all.’

Natasha’s eyes lingered on her, a fraction longer than was polite. Women like this, beautiful long-limbed women, became models. Smart women who tied their gold-red hair in severe ponytails, who wore tailored charcoal business suits and who had practiced their diction until it was as sharp-edged as a diamond, became expensive lawyers or expensive accountants. They became CEOs and managed their power carefully, like a commodity that might run out at any second. They became the wives of men rich enough to stay out of the spotlight and bought Rothkos and university endowments.

They didn’t end up in abandoned libraries talking to Big Brother and hiring killers to go after other killers. Not without something that settled down bone-deep, than even money couldn’t wash away.

‘Is that what they told you?’ Natasha said. ‘That it was irrelevant?’

 _Mistake._ She saw the shutters snap into place behind the other woman’s eyes, the bolts slide home. Hogan turned back to the screen, this particular conversation politely but firmly over.

‘I’m a very private person, Ms Romanoff,’ she said, and Natasha was sure that was that, until she spoke again, shoulders a little slumped, even the good one, voice edged with grey. ‘But we all have regrets.’

***


	5. Now

5\. _Now_

— _alive_.

She woke up abruptly, pushed back into consciousness by an edge of pain. She tensed for a moment, which drove little scarlet jabs of pain into her side, smelled smoke and fire and blood. Then she realised there was only clean air and a faint scent of lavender, and that she wasn’t lying on tarmac but rather on a bed, the pillows marshmallow-soft.

Someone else was in the room. Not a threat, though: they’d either have killed her or restrained her by now. Memories seeped in: a basement with fluorescent lights, Pepper trying to stop her bleeding with her hands, a car—

Pepper.

She opened her eyes. The other woman was sitting on a chair by her bed, eyelids droopy and sleep-smudged. She must have been sitting there all night despite the discomfort in her hip, wearing a ratty T-shirt and jean shorts. Another pang of pain bit into Natasha’s side.

‘Hey,’ she said. Her voice sounded hoarser than usual. Maybe it was just the ringing still echoing in the back of her head. She began hoisting herself higher on the pillows and couldn’t help but let out a little groan of pain.

Pepper’s eyes snapped open and she edged across the chair. ‘You’re up. You weren’t supposed to wake up.’

‘Ever, or…? No, it’s OK,’ Natasha added when she saw Pepper cover up a grimace of discomfort, lightning-quick. _боже мой_. What a pair they made. She pushed the pain away and squirmed into a sitting position. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘For saving my life.’

‘You matter to me,’ Pepper said, and lowered her eyes. ‘A lot.’

‘I know. Two hundred grand. How much is that per stitch?’

‘Well, there were also ruptured vessels, so only about three thousand. You also hit your head, but I don’t think that counts.’

‘A real bargain, then.’ Her voice cooled. ‘Davis.’ Of course she had made her dumb jokes before asking about him. Of course. This was where normal people would feel guilt and she felt nothing.

‘He didn’t make it. He was dead before the paramedics arrived.’

‘While I was there, you mean.’

‘There was nothing you could have done,’ Pepper said, and Natasha knew she was talking to both of them. Maybe not just about a poor kid who had died hard on a stretch of dirty tarmac. ‘Nobody could. The shrapnel injured him too badly.’

_No. I could have._

If she’d spotted the trap sooner.

If she’d cased the pick-up point better.

If.

‘He told me to turn around,’ she said and winced at another jab of pain as she adjusted her position. Pain was good. It was better than nothing. ‘Is this where you live?’ she added, before Pepper could say anything.

‘Yes. Most of the time.’

For a while neither of them said anything. Natasha looked at the cream walls, the green light filtering in through the big tree outside the window.

She couldn’t look at the ragged skin on Pepper’s fingertips where she’d bitten her nails, the edge of red to her eyes.

‘Wow. And I only had to nearly die for you to bring me here,’ she said.

‘I should have—’ Pepper didn’t finish the sentence, and instead stood up, creakily, then turned around. ‘We can’t save everyone. Sometimes… We can’t save everyone.’

‘I know. He’s not the first person I let die. Believe me.’ She felt her damaged left side, the bandages under the pyjama top someone had put her in. She saw herself lying on a table while Pepper cut away her top and her bra with her bloodied hands and pushed the image away. ‘So, someone’s obviously dirty, otherwise they wouldn’t know where to set the bomb off. You think the idea was to make it look like a terrorist attack?’ She edged towards the side of the bed, swallowing grunts of pain. ‘They’ve probably already got someone to pin it on.’

Pepper hurried to her side, put a hand on her shoulder. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

Natasha cocked an eyebrow. ‘What does it look like I’m doing? The job’s not finished. I have to—’

Pepper pushed her back onto the bed. ‘No, _you_ have to rest.’ She was stronger than Pepper, but right now Natasha’s muscles felt like jelly.

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I spoke to Davis’ parents,’ Pepper said, in a voice like an iron band. ‘I understand fully.’ She straightened up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, softer.

‘I’m… sorry too.’

‘Do you need something for the pain?’

‘No. No, I’m OK. Just a little hungry.’

Pepper gave her shoulder a squeeze before she pulled her hand away. ‘I’ll go grab you something to eat. Don’t worry, I won’t cook. I got you some new clothes, by the way. They should be the right size.’ She stepped towards the door.

‘Pepper.’

‘Yes?’

The look on her face as she turned around was a little expectant, and Natasha found that sharper than the pain in her side, even without knowing why.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

She waited until she could no longer hear Pepper’s footsteps, then dragged herself out of bed, motion by motion, biting her tongue so she’d be quiet. Pain was nothing. Pain, you fought through. A hand on her left shoulder, an older woman leaning down to whisper in her ear. _You are better, Nata. You don’t want to be weak like them._

Still she felt nothing. She just willed the memory to go away.

She had already cased the bedroom when she’d been lying in bed, but now she couldn’t help but take another look. There was an abstract expressionist painting on a wall, a canvas of primary colour squares, and the rest of the room was much like it: clean lines, make-up and brushes laid neatly on a dressing table, an ordered row of pens and pencils on a small desk. Natasha’s hand hovered above a drawer handle. On the back of the desk, half-hidden by a lamp as though Pepper could neither look at it nor get rid of it, sat a photo. Pepper was wearing slacks and a sleeveless top and a smile so deep ever her eyes shone. She was standing under one end of a banner reading —JECT —N LIGHTS, holding a hand that ended at the wrist; the other half of the photo had been cut away.

Natasha lowered her hand. She wasn’t going to look through the drawers. It was— It was _Pepper_. She couldn’t do that to her.

Moments later, she was in the clothes Pepper had left for her—they fit perfectly, but she had expected nothing else—and climbing down the back of the brownstone. A wave of nausea hit her as she reached the ground. She held onto the brickwork for a moment, until her head stopped swimming, then started moving, slow at fist, then picking up speed as she grew used to the burning in her side.

It wasn’t hard for her to set up bolt-holes, as long as there was a street somewhere with babushkas who still spoke mostly Russian. Pepper’s brownstone was in Park Slope, so at least she didn’t have to go far to reach the subway. She’d walked farther with worse wounds, after all.

She glanced at the traffic cams, the black-eyed lenses on the corners of buildings, and wondered who was watching.

The safe house was just a small apartment where must of the furniture was crates and where the air always smelled of fried onions, but it was away from prying eyes, including digital ones. Natasha drew the blinds shut, sat in the bare living room, and started peeling away the bandages.

_Finish the mission._

She’d bled, but she’d been bred to heal fast, and so the wounds in her side and the top of her left thigh didn’t bother her so much once she’d dressed them again, taped them up, and chewed a pair of hydrocodone pills. Once the pain was a little blunted, she stepped into the middle of the dusty floorboards and started her warm-up, barefooted, teeth fastened on her tongue so she wouldn’t make any noises.

Not the first person she’d let die. Step. Kick.

Eyes open to the empty sky, unseeing. Step. Kick.

Young. They were always so young. A little girl, face chubby with baby fat. Stretch. Twist.

 _Focus_. Palms on the floor. Up. Up. _Do it. Do it, Nata. Again._ Lungs filling with water. _Do it again. Do it_ again.

‘Достаточно!’ She didn’t realise the word was out of her mouth until it hung in the air. She was lying on the floor, under the barre. She had burst some of her stitches, and now pain wrapped around her like barbed wire and her clothes were soaked with sweat.

_You’re all wrong. On the inside. Where I can see._

She’d always been good at making her past multiple choice. Now her head was full of thoughts, little tyrants who wouldn’t go away when she told them to.

That moment of certainty in the end. When they knew they were going to die and that you weren’t going to stop it.

_You thought you could be something you’re not._

She sat on the crate again, wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, half-swallowed a hiss as she prodded at the wounds.

‘I know what I am,’ she said to the empty room in a hoarse whisper, then got up and went to the false wall hiding rows of guns, coils of rope hanging from hooks, a set of burner phones, lock-picking tools, gadgets ranging from magnets that’d instantly erase a hard drive to smoke bombs to an EMP device disguised as a pack of chewing gum.

She knew what she had to do.

+

It was late when Detective Hill finally arrived at the all-night diner and slid into the booth where Natasha sat, half-hidden inside a hoodie.

‘God, you look terrible,’ Hill said.

‘Thanks. Did you bring the stuff I asked for?’

Hill patted something inside her—

_backpack_

—messenger bag. ‘It’s here. All the stuff we have so far on the Franklin Street bombing.’ Hill looked up at her. ‘Plus the things from… other sources.’

‘Wow, is that the new euphemism for being dirty?’

Hill barely flinched at that. She must have heard it enough throughout all the times Natasha had pressed her for information ever since she’d started working with—

Ever since she’d started working her new job.

‘Before I give this to you,’ Hill said, ‘I need to know something.’

Natasha rubbed the bridge of her nose. The bombing had blared at her from newspaper headlines and TV sets. _Bomb kills one, injures three_. Grieving relatives. Crappy cellphone footage. Talking heads and police spokespeople.

She had seen footage of the spot where it’d happened, police tape all around it, stains on the tarmac.

Still she’d felt nothing.

_All wrong._

‘I need to know what you’re going to use this for,’ Hill finished.

‘That didn’t seem to bother you when you were passing info to the Gambino crime family,’ Natasha said.

Hill blinked but didn’t look away. ‘Go on,’ she said. Her voice was firm, but there was a flicker of hurt in her dark eyes. ‘Let’s get it over with. Get it all out. Please. I insist.’

Natasha said nothing for a moment, just looked at the lines of tiredness on the corners of Hill’s eyes. One day she’d made a bad call and she’d found out you couldn’t climb out of that hole.

Maybe that was why she had always rubbed Natasha wrong.

‘I can’t tell you what I’m going to do. Just that it’s nothing you need to worry about,’ Natasha said, her tone a fraction softer.

Hill opened her mouth to say something, then sighed and put a set of manila files on the table, next to Natasha’s empty coffee cups. ‘Fine. Here you go.’

‘Thanks,’ Natasha said, and stood up, wincing a little at the pull on her side. She grabbed the files. ‘Thanks for bringing me these.’

‘That’s great. Look, I—take care of yourself.’

She wasn’t a hero.

‘First I have to put things right,’ Natasha said.

***


	6. Then

6\. _Then_

They had just finished their ninth mission when Natasha paid a visit to the office where one of the other woman’s cover identities worked. By that time Natasha had started thinking of her as Virginia. She had plenty of fake IDs—she was working at this company under the surname Stark—but the given name was always the same. It might even be real.

‘Coffee, Mr Hammer? And I have corrected the Q4 forecast.’

Natasha had only ever seen her in the kind of clothes that cost at least four figures—business suits and, one time, during the Bolivian embassy job, an evening dress sown with tiny pearls. Now she was wearing an off-the-rack twinset and stood slightly hunched over the cup she was carrying in her left hand. Her eyes flicked up towards Natasha, only once.

She was good. Natasha couldn’t help but be a little impressed.

Just a little.

‘Great, great,’ Hammer said, only half-listening. ‘This is Miss Ronan.’

‘Roman, but you can call me Nadine,’ Natasha said, sprinkling the words with exclamation points. ‘I’m the new temp. Legal sent me up.’ She shook the sheaf of papers she was holding, under her chest, where they’d draw attention to her breasts and away from everything else.

‘Miss Stark here is my PA,’ Hammer said as Virginia placed the cup on the mahogany desk and stirred the coffee with a cinnamon stick and a practiced hand. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you show Nadine around, Gin?’

_Gin?_

The smile on the other woman’s face was obsequious, but Natasha was sure there were steel barbs underneath it.

‘Ooh, can you? I’d love that,’ Natasha said.

‘Certainly, Mr Hammer,’ Virginia said, and ushered her out smoothly, the stiffness in her hip half-disguised in a sort of rolling gait, her bad arm bent a little at the elbow.

‘Do you always do everything he tells you?’ Natasha asked as soon as they were out of earshot. She smiled a pink bubblegum smile at a passing employee.

‘It’s my job to do everything and anything Mr Hammer requires,’ Virginia said, looking straight ahead, voice glass-smooth.

‘Does he know you’re the real owner of Hammer Investments?’

The other woman dropped the mask. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I like knowing the variables. I may also have joined your office’s bowling league.’ She tilted her head a little at the visible clench in the other woman’s body. ‘Relax. I’ll get out of your hair.’

She didn’t go far. It was past six when Virginia came to her, to the steps of the abandoned library. HQ. Natasha was starting to have a certain fondness for the place.

‘I thought we had an agreement,’ Virginia said as she stood above Natasha, hair a red-tinged halo in the afternoon sun. She had taken off her jacket and Natasha could see the handful of freckles below the hollow at the base of her throat, where she’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse.

Natasha pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose and held out one of her two paper cups. ‘Tea? Lemon, lots of honey. It started off ice-cold, but—’

Virginia didn’t take the cup. ‘Did you go to my house too?’ She didn’t sound angry, just a little annoyed. ‘I’m going to assume you found it.’

‘No.’

She made a small motion of exasperation that was half-shrug, half-sigh. Natasha had seen it enough times by now, when someone they had to rescue slipped through their fingers or rushed headlong into danger. ‘Do you always lie, Miss Romanoff?’

Natasha took a sip of her own drink, leaving a ring of lipstick on the plastic straw. ‘Most people expect too much from the truth,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t lying.’ Despite everything, it was true, and she had to fight a note of hurt off her voice. She knew she was supposed to laugh at that—she was a spy, or had been, at any rate, not a soldier, not a partner, not anyone’s BFF—but she couldn’t help but dislike the thought of this woman thinking ill of her.

She knew she was supposed to laugh at _that_ , too. She couldn’t do that either.

‘I’m sorry,’ Virginia said, and wiped a spot on one of the steps before she smoothed down her skirt and sat down. ‘That was really rude of me.’

Natasha looked at the other woman over the sunglasses, then pushed them back up the bridge of her nose. ‘Hey, can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, though if you don’t answer that’s kind of an answer—’

‘Just ask the question,’ Virginia said, rather curtly.

Natasha waited a second before she spoke in her most serious voice. ‘Do you really go by “Gin”?’

A muscle twitched in Virginia’s cheek before she broke into a smile. Natasha felt herself grin in response, not sure why. This was just a job, and she was just a knife and this was just a boss who trusted her just as far as she could throw her, but she couldn’t help but like this, sitting here in the cool shadow of a cathedral of books under the last golden embers of summer, watching the city that never slept go by. She wasn’t even wary when her eyes landed on a CCTV camera and she thought of the thousand eyes of the Machine, if he _(shit,_ it _)_ was seeing this, recording it in its brain of ones and zeros until the info got deleted again.

Maybe because this time she was saving lives instead of taking them, and it was real, not the old lies of old men.

‘Because if you do,’ she went on, ‘I hear nowadays there’s treatments for that. Support groups…’

‘I don’t go by Gin,’ Virginia said. ‘Mr Hammer is a very inattentive man. It makes it easier for me to keep an eye on things. There are also some downsides.’

‘I bet.’ She took another sip. ‘So should I call you Virginia from now on? That’s your real name, isn’t it? You use it in all your aliases.’

The air cooled. ‘Don’t bother the boss,’ Natasha said. ‘Got it.’ She pretended to lock her lips with a key and hoped she wasn’t over-selling it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Virginia said. ‘It’s just that I—’

‘Don’t trust me. Don’t worry about it. I’m a spy, most people don’t.’

‘Pepper.’

‘Sorry?’

The other woman held out her hand, the right one, with the fingers that didn’t work quite right. ‘Pepper. My name’s Virginia, but that’s what—that’s what I used to be called. Pepper. You, ah—’ Her face was reddening and she spoke with little of her usual smoothness. ‘You won’t find Virginia Potts on any record, but that’s me. Pepper Potts. That’s my name.’

Natasha took the offered hand, carefully, as though mishandling might break it. ‘Whoa. Your real nickname is even more amazingly terrible.’ That got a chuckle, and Natasha wondered why she’d never made the other woman laugh before. ‘Natalia Alianovna Romanova. You can call me Natasha.’

‘You can call me Pepper, Ms Ro— Natasha.’ It sounded good when she said it.

‘Did you know someone called Hogan?’

The smile faded a little, but not entirely. ‘A good friend.’

‘And Stark?’

She looked away. ‘Someone I used to know.’ For a while there was only the din of traffic. ‘Nice day today.’

They sat like that for a while, side by side, saying nothing, until Natasha got used to the sound of the other woman’s breathing, the feel of her body next to hers. She wondered if Pepper was staring into the past, and wished she could tell her there was nothing there but ghosts.

The next time Natasha paid a visit to the Hammer Investments office building, “Virginia Stark” had quit.

***


	7. Now

***

7\. _Now_

Detective Hill was the kind of person who was dishonest in a completely honest way, so her intel turned out to be mostly good, good enough for Natasha to be driving towards a pier where there would be no prying eyes.

It hadn’t taken her too long to find him, to shake down the right people for the right breadcrumbs. It hadn’t taken her too long to trap him. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

She parked the car out of sight, next to a tower of shipping containers, and sat in silence for a while. Once in a while there was the distant chime of a buoy, a muffled sound coming from the trunk.

She had been somewhere like this before. All the old familiar places, where no one would hear screams, and where anyone at all could disappear.

Home was the place you never really left. Or it never left you. It was all the same in the end.

_You wanted to be something you’re not._

She pulled the burner phone out of her jacket pocket, dialled a number before she could regret it.

He picked up on the third ring.

A suppressed yawn. ‘Rhodey here.’

‘Hey, Detective.’

The sleepiness drained instantly out of his voice. ‘Hey.’

‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No, no,’ he lied, then paused for a few seconds. ‘You’ve got something you think I should know about.’

‘I just wanted to talk.’

They were both silent for a little while. How many times had she tangoed with Detective Rhodes since Pepper and the Machine had come into her life with a map full of coloured pins and a scent of expensive perfume? He’d called her a vigilante once and she told him he needed to quit reading comic books.

Maybe she needed to believe in something like that, just for a second.

‘Why don’t you come in? We can have a chat. Just you and me.’

‘Are you trying to place me under arrest, Detective?’

‘No. Nothing like that,’ he said. Too fast.

‘Goodbye, Detective Rhodes.’

‘Wai—’

She ended the call, then sat still for a while, hands on the wheel, so tight her leather gloves squeaked. The ocean was streaked with light, but inside the car it was dark, with only the faint haze of sodium lamps.

She had been raised with a blade in her hand. To know it was a tool, and nothing more.

She thought she would know what to do when it got taken away.

The pain was back, its teeth sharp and deep again, but when she slipped out of the car and made her way to the back, her movements were as sleek as ever. Outside the air was cool and smelled of dirty water and salt. She set her bag on the gravel and opened the trunk.

His ankles were tied together, but she knew he was going to kick at her once the trunk was popped and she hit his shin with the butt of her gun, hard enough to make him groan into his gag.

‘Play nice,’ she said, and pointed the gun at his head. The glint of light on his glasses and the whites of his eyes were visible even inside the trunk, and he stood still while she undid the zip-tie binding his ankles. He squirmed as she grabbed one of his feet and told him to get out of trunk, but not much. He knew how this game was played, and who had the upper hand.

‘Walk,’ she said, once he stood on the gravel, and pointed the gun at him. With his feet bare and his hands tied behind his back, he was slow, but they got there in the end, to the edge of the concrete pier, fenced in by shipping containers.

He wasn’t stupid. He’d known what was coming from the moment she got him into the trunk of his car, once he saw the water, black and thick like oil. She ordered him to stop and dropped the bag on the ground.

He tried to made a break for it.

She couldn’t help but be a little impressed, even if his tied hands made him move like a puppet with its strings cut. She shot his calf and he went sprawling across the ground with a strangled cry and a heavy slap of flesh on concrete.

‘Oh, calm down,’ she drawled as she kneeled by his side. ‘I barely grazed you.’ She pressed her free hand on his chest and he stopped writhing. The barrel of her gun was inches away from his forehead. She reached up to one of the edges of the duct tape plastered across his mouth. ‘If I peel this off, are you going to behave?’

He was breathing hard enough to make the tape puff in and out a little, but still he nodded. She peeled away the gag, fast. She wasn’t cruel.

Or not often, at least.

She’d expected him to scream, but instead he gulped for air, then spat out some drool before speaking in a defiant grumble. ‘Are you fucking insane? Do you have any idea who you’re messing with?’

She cocked one eyebrow. ‘So you no longer think I’m pretty?’ She ignored the lance of pain in her side and straightened up. ‘Your name is Sitwell.’ Even in the dark she could see him wince at the words for a split second. ‘Three days ago you set off a bomb that killed one person, injured three. One of the three may not make it.’

‘My condolences,’ he spat out. She resisted the urge to hit him with the butt of the gun again.

‘I was protecting the person you killed. He learned something he shouldn’t have. Someone went to a great deal of effort to shut him up.’ She pointed the gun at Sitwell’s left eye and he edged his head away. ‘I know it wasn’t one of the Five Families. Who was it? Russian mob? One of the triads?’

He straightened up a little. His right leg, the one she’d shot, was sprawled on the ground, and even in the dark she could see the bloodstain. ‘Lady, you know what you’re dealing with? You’ve woken the dragon. And you’ve got no idea what’s coming.’

She stared, gun held firm. ‘Is this the part where you tell me you’re not going to talk?’

‘Fuck off.’

They were always cocky at first. Even sweaty with fear, they were cocky.

‘I’m not going to try to make you talk.’ She nudged the bag with the tip of her boot. ‘If I hurt you, all you’ll end up doing is tell me whatever I want to hear. So that won’t work.

‘Unless all I want to do is hurt you, of course.’

He tried to disguise the flicker of fear, but she still caught it.

Maybe nobody had taken a girl and turned her into a wolf. Maybe they’d just found someone whose thorns always fit perfectly into everyone’s wounds.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn’t pick it up, just let it rumble away inside her jacket.

‘What the fuck do you want?’ Sitwell said. Not so defiant now.

She kept still, the gun trained on him, and looked beyond him at the ocean, the starless sky. In the quiet all she felt was the night air, numbing her skin.

‘Nobody would hear a shot here,’ she said. ‘Or a splash.’

He just stared at her, glasses a little askew, his chest rising and falling. When he spoke his tone was a fraction more subdued than before. ‘Is that what this is about? Revenge?’

‘No. That kid you killed, I only knew him for a few hours.’

The phone buzzed again and this time she took it out of her pocket, gun and stare still pointed at Sitwell, unblinking, unmoving. ‘Hello, Pepper,’ she said.

The voice on the other end sounded tired. ‘Hello.’

‘Do you have me under surveillance too?’

‘No. The phone you’re using just sat for a little while next to Detective Hill’s phone. That’s all.’

She’d forgotten about that, or maybe she hadn’t.

She didn’t answer, just listened to the very faint hiss of static coming from the cell phone’s speaker. Maybe it was the explosion, still ringing in her ears. Maybe the Machine, listening in.

‘Natalia,’ Pepper said. Natasha blinked. She felt something now, like a little sliver of glass. ‘Natalia.’ It sounded like a prayer.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, before she dropped the phone to the ground and crushed it under her foot.

When she was done, she spoke to Sitwell again. ‘You were a fed, once upon a time. Maybe you heard of me. They used to call me the Black Widow.’

He had some kind of retort ready, she could tell, until realisation dawned. ‘Shit.’ He sat up a little. ‘I know who you are. The things they say you did—’

‘I did them.’

‘Ah, Christ, did _he_ send you? I swear I didn’t—’

‘No.’

She said nothing for the longest time, just stood with the gun pointed at him. Gulls cried close to shore; clouds were rolling in from the sea.

There was always that look, where people realised they were going to die. That there was nothing they could do to stop it. She’d seen it often enough. When they stared into a dark tunnel, where all the lights were winked out.

Sitwell wasn’t going to try to run, he wasn’t going to try to plead. They were both far beyond that now. He just stared at her, his breath ragged, head shiny with sweat even in the near-dark.

‘I learned something from that time,’ she said. ‘This is how it ends for people like us. It ends in a secret prison. A black site. A warehouse behind a train station. A barrel thrown off a pier. When there’s no more room for us in the world. But Davis, he wasn’t one of us.’ She leaned down towards him, until the gun’s muzzle was inches away from his face, until the two of them were as close as lovers, or enemies. He tried to squirm away, but she held him still, made him look at her. ‘I have too much in my ledger to wipe out. That’s what I am. Someone who’d like to put a bullet in your head. But someone told me I was more than a weapon. So maybe we all get to choose, even with that. Maybe I want to choose.’

She lowered the gun, just a fraction. He looked at her, lips parted, his breath still heavy.

‘So help me choose,’ she said.

***


	8. Now

8\. _Now_

Pepper had left the back door unlocked and was sitting on the living room sofa when Natasha made it back home—made it back to her house. All the lights were out, only a thread of moonlight falling in, tinging Pepper’s hair silver and blue.

‘You didn’t have to wait up for me,’ Natasha said after she’d stood in silence for a few seconds.

‘It took you a while.’

‘I left you a message,’ Natasha said.

‘You can’t do that, you know. You can’t just disappear.’

Natasha said nothing.

‘Did you do it?’ Pepper said, voice smooth as ice. ‘What you went to do.’

Natasha swallowed, hands balled at her sides. ‘I went for a ride.’

‘There’s blood on your gloves.’

There was a small dark stain on the white rug, visible even in the moonlight. Natasha was sure she could feel another drop, sliding down the leather, welling on the end of a knuckle. In daylight, it would be a bright, arterial red. She pictured pages covered in it, dripping, _gushing_. ‘It’s not my blood.’

Pepper stood up, slowly. Her robe’s belt was loose and Natasha could see a smooth strip of skin. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘It’s not my blood.’ She raised a hand and Pepper stopped, an arm’s length away from her. ‘Do you want to know what I did?’ She closed her eyes. She didn’t see the dead. Instead she saw that dark tunnel she had made so many people look into in all her many lives. What would she see when it was finally her turn? Pouring accelerant in a hospital’s laundry room? Wrapping a wire around someone’s neck to get at the real target?

Then nothing. Always nothing.

Except for this thing, deep inside her chest, dull and grey. The colour of broken glass or a blunted blade. She should feel something, shouldn’t she? Something like shame, or guilt, or regret.

‘Do you want to know what really happened in Mogadishu? What I did after I thought I was on the right side? When I thought I was wiping red off my ledger? Do you want to know what I did before? What I did before they let me out for my first mission? What I went along with? Because it was easy. Because they knew it would never bother me enough for me to stand up to them.’

‘That was never your fault.’

A pistol and a length of rope placed into her hands. _Tonight one of you is going to prove to be strong, and another is going to prove to be weak. Choose wisely._ Yes. Yes. _Yes, I am strong._ Whose fault was it, then?

Had anyone ever held a gun to her head?

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Natasha said. The edges of her voice were shaky without the edge of a knife, without a layer of lipstick hard and shiny like lacquer. ‘It was still me. That doesn’t change. I got to find out what kind of person I am. I just thought I was done with the past.’ She let out a chuckle like a spoonful of poison. ‘I guess you can’t really run away from it, huh?’ 

Someone was always watching, after all.

‘So why did you come back?’ Pepper said.

‘I—’ She closed her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to see the other woman’s face. ‘You,’ she whispered.

Pepper’s fingers were on her chin. She opened her eyes. Pepper had taken a step forward and they were inches away from each other, close enough for Natasha to feel her heat, the scent of her jasmine lotion.

‘Do you want to know what I know?’ Pepper said. Her voice was steel wrapped in velvet. ‘I know you didn’t kill anyone tonight.’ She dropped her hand. ‘And I know what I did. I know what I didn’t do. How long I kept my eyes closed because it was none of my business, because I was comfortable, because it was unpleasant to think about, because…’ Half-shrug, half-sigh. ‘I know what I let happen. What I could have stopped but didn’t. So don’t think you’re the only one with blood on her hands.’

She lowered her eyes in shame; seeing that was like another sharp little thorn on Natasha’s side.

‘Is that why you picked me to help you?’ Natasha said, her voice unguarded. ‘Be honest with me.’

‘No. Because you quit. Because you couldn’t be the bad guy.’ She looked into Natasha’s eyes. ‘And then you didn’t know what to do because you can’t turn your back on things. You can’t not be the good guy.’

Words clotted in Natasha’s throat. ‘I’m not a hero.’

‘No. You’re someone the world needs. Someone I—’

Natasha took a step forward, her jacket brushing against Pepper’s breasts. The other woman was almost half a foot taller than her, but they fit together perfectly and the pain on Natasha’s side had been drowned out by the yearning under her skin. ‘I guess I can’t be that bad,’ she whispered. ‘If someone like you thinks that of me.’

If someone like Pepper could look at her like she was looking now, full of want and trust.

‘Natasha…’

She slid her gloved fingers over Pepper’s hair, but it was Pepper who leaned into the kiss first, eyes closed. Natasha drew her in closer as she kissed her back. Her wounds throbbed, but all she cared about was the feel of Pepper’s mouth on her, the taste of her lips and her skin.

She pulled away, finally, and they managed to make it into the bedroom, hand-in-hand like fumbling teenagers. Heat pooled in Natasha’s lower belly, between her thighs. They settled on the side of the bed as Natasha kicked her boots away. ‘Take my gloves off,’ she said.

She made Pepper draw it out, slide the gloves off inch by inch, tug down the zipper on her jacket maddeningly slow while she kissed the other woman’s neck, pulled her robe open and ran a hand over her breasts, teasing through the fabric of her bra until her nipples were hard with want.

‘God,’ Pepper whispered. Natasha grinned. She loved seeing her like this, flustered, her breath coming hard and fast, robe fallen halfway down her body, her skin feverish with desire. She slipped one hand between Pepper’s legs, felt the slickness through the lace underpants.

‘Shh,’ Natasha said. She tried to lie down on the bed and winced at the sudden pull of pain.

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Come here.’ Natasha lay down on her right side. Pepper settled down in front of her, face-to-face, her bare legs tangled in Natasha’s jean-clad ones. Natasha ran her fingers from Pepper’s waist, up her belly, over her arm, up to the hollow at the base of her throat. She wanted to feel every inch of her, the ripples of goosebumps where she touched her skin.

‘You like this, don’t you?’ she whispered as she ran the tip of her thumb over Pepper’s lips. ‘Me telling you what to do for a change.’

‘Yes,’ Pepper groaned, eyes closed, hand under Natasha’s shirt, and took Natasha’s thumb into her warm, wet mouth, sucked at the tip, teased it with her tongue.

Natasha closed her eyes, the hunger in every nerve ending stronger than pain, stronger than memories, stronger than anything.’ Roll over,’ she managed to get out.

She pulled the robe off and tossed it away as Pepper settled in, back pressed against Natasha’s breasts. She could feel Pepper’s heat through the fabric of her top, and the jeans dug into her flesh, a seam pressing painful-sweet on her clit. She put her left arm around Pepper’s waist and buried her face in the fall of copper hair, nuzzled Pepper’s neck.

Pepper’s breath quickened along with hers as Natasha reached up for her breasts, slipped her left hand under the elastic band of her bra. She drew it out, slow, teasing, as long as she could, until the heat inside her felt like a physical necessity. Her hand dipped down, rubbing little circles on Pepper’s belly, massaging the smooth skin around her belly button. Her right arm was wedged between the two of them, fingertips touching the sensitive skin on the nape of Pepper’s neck.

‘Natasha…’ Pepper begged, and clutched at Natasha’s arm with her hand, hooked Natasha’s leg with hers.

Natasha slipped her fingers inside Pepper’s underpants, dipped down between her legs, into the slick heat between her thighs. She only teased at first, fingertips brushing against Pepper’s clit, thumb kneading the hot flesh, palm pressing weakly against her. Pepper gasped into a pillow, pushed back against Natasha, sending ripples of pleasure and ache through her body.

‘Say it again,’ Natasha mouthed into Pepper’s neck, and ran the tip of her tongue over her skin. It tasted of salt and night blooms and heat.

Pepper squeezed Natasha’s wrist with her thighs. One hand had grabbed a fistful of bedcovers, the other was on Natasha’s leg, urging her forward. She gasped as Natasha settled into a slow, deep rhythm, working every inch of her with her clever hand, their bodies rocking together. ‘Natalia. Natalia.’

Natasha whispered sweet nothings in Russian into Pepper’s hair, into Pepper’s shaking shoulders, and inside her head there wasn’t any room for anything else.

+

The storm clouds had come in earnest and rain beat a lullaby against the window. Natasha stirred. Her clothes were on the floor and she was fighting a tangle of rumpled sheets.

‘It’s all right.’ An arm drew her closer. Pepper, nestled at her side, hair a copper tangle, face still damp with sweat from their lovemaking, halfway between wakefulness and sleep. She yawned. ‘Did I hurt you?’ she muttered.

‘No. No,’ Natasha said. Her eyes were damp. She didn’t know if it was sweat or tears.

Pepper patted her curls, eyes closed, drowsy with sleep. ‘’s OK.’

Natasha settled down at her side. Pepper burrowed closer, breath steady. Safe and sound.

There was a mess of skin ridges on Pepper’s left hip, most likely burn marks. They’d reminded Natasha of a tree, or the map of a river delta. The damage on her right arm was much more precise, the lines left behind by repeated surgeries, probably to replace destroyed joints, pin shattered bones back together.

Natasha hadn’t asked what had happened. She didn’t think she ever would.

It was enough to know they both had scars.

***


	9. After

9\. _After_

In the morning Natasha let herself stay in bed for a little while, looking at the other woman. Asleep, Pepper looked younger, strands of hair sticking to her face and neck. Once in a while Natasha would run her fingertips, feather-light, over the swell of her hip, up her arm and across the top of one breast, and Pepper would shift a little in her sleep, make a little half-grunt, half-snuffle sound.

Natasha liked it.

Soon enough she was outside, on the front steps. The rain had stopped and everything smelled green. She watched the neighbourhood go by, listened to car engines and the rustle of the wind in the trees. She remembered being a little girl and looking at people—that woman pushing a stroller, that man walking a black labrador—in the same way she looked at mannequins in shop-windows under a dazzle of lights, wanting, envying.

 _Always sniffling, Nata_ , said a ghost. It didn’t matter. It could not touch her.

After a while, she heard the front door open and close. Pepper settled down on the step by her side.

‘Good morning,’ Pepper said.

‘Morning.’

They both looked down at the street.

‘Detective Rhodes made an arrest last night,’ Pepper went on.

‘Yeah?’

‘Apparently they found a suspect in the bombing down in Port Newark. Tied to a mooring bollard.’

‘Sounds careless of him.’

‘He’s been very cooperative. Implicating all kinds of people.’ She turned to Natasha, a little amused. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘Not much.’

‘I see.’

The two of them were silent again for a while, sitting side-by-side, and Natasha found out just how much she liked the feel of Pepper’s leg and arm brushing against her, the feel of her weight and her warmth.

‘I know you have your apartment,’ Pepper said at last. ‘But you can stay here. I mean, if you want. I mean—it’s just. It’s you—’

‘Hey,’ Natasha said. ‘It’s OK.’

Pepper fell silent again, relief flowing into her face. Instead of saying anything, her hand slid across the sun-beaten step and moved under Natasha’s. Natasha welcomed it, sheltered it under hers.

Pepper looked at her with a smile so deep even her eyes shone.

It was true, what Natasha had told Sitwell last night, about what she’d learned from the world and all the things it had done to her and she to it. But she had learned other things, too. She had learned from the book that another little wolf-girl had passed to her under a school desk, two lives ago. She had learned from the first life she’d ever saved. From an injured man in Budapest, showing her mercy when all she’d shown him was teeth. From telling someone she’d keep them safe even when she couldn’t keep all her promises. From a woman who was brave and steel-willed and kind and had let her in, unafraid.

Happiness was the enemy. She had learned that too. All it did was give you something to lose.

But this—this, maybe she’d get to keep.

‘What do we do now?’ Pepper said, finally.

Natasha shrugged. ‘What we’ve always done. I try not to think too much about the future. I’m Russian, after all.’ Or was, at any rate.

‘Speaking of Russian, you realise leaving a fifth of scotch and an orange on the kitchen counter doesn’t qualify as making me breakfast, right?’

Natasha threw her a smirk. ‘You didn’t have any vodka. And my cooking is almost as bad as yours. I mix a mean martini, though.’

‘Thanks. You’re always so thoughtful.’ She paused mid-grin and Natasha tensed a little, then relaxed as Pepper let go of her hand and fished a phone from her sweatpants’ pocket.

‘Is it the Machine? A new number?’

Her heart pressed against her ribcage. No more failures.

Pepper frowned and shook her head while she looked at the phone. ‘No. No—look.’

On the screen, instead of a number, there was a text message. Single line, all caps.

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?

‘Someone hacked your phone?’

‘No. No, it’s from the Machine.’ Pepper pressed a few keys, as though that would undo the message, and muttered to herself. ‘You can’t compromise the Machine, there is no access point. It’s not how it works. The system—’

‘Pepper.’

The other woman fell silent, looked at her.

Nothing was forever. But there was this. This day. This mission. This woman.

‘Let’s go get them.’

+++The End+++

**Author's Note:**

> Will Davis is a reference to Chad Davis from Iron Man 3. I didn’t want to use a canon character, but apparently I couldn’t resist a silly little joke. ;)
> 
>  _You wanted to be something you’re not. A hero._ — paraphrased from a similar line from the game [_Spec Ops: The Line_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spec_Ops:_The_Line), which was also the inspiration for Natasha’s Mogadishu mission, at least in terms of themes and implications for the character rather than plot details. Hopefully (she said) I also got across the idea that this was this universe’s equivalent of Natasha’s discovery in CA:TWS that she traded the KGB for Hydra.
> 
> So, in addition to Natasha taking the Reese role and Pepper taking the Finch role, Rhodey is Carter, Maria Hill is Fusco, and Tony is the Machine. (And how he ended up as the Machine would probably be a fic in itself.) I couldn’t work Root and Shaw into the story but if you’re a _Person of Interest_ fan, I hope you liked what’s implied at the end. :)
> 
>  _Perhaps we should make the library a place of silent reflexion_ — I guess AU!Pepper is a _True Detective_ fan.
> 
> Like Rushman, Nadine Roman is one of Natasha’s aliases in the comics.
> 
> Finally, I would like to say once more that I hope the story was to the prompter’s liking, or at least that you didn’t find it too terrible. :)


End file.
